“May I meet him?”

Another sigh. “You may do much more than meet him, Evan. It will be your task to take Mr. Butec and his most valuable manuscript to America.”

For a few moments I said nothing. Extreme shock often has that effect upon me. Then I said, “Janos, you honor me. But what you ask is impossible. I’m not on my way home now. I have to go north, I have to travel through Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland -”

“Mr. Butec will travel with you.”

“Janos, I have to enter Russia!”

“That is very dangerous. But it would be still more dangerous for Mr. Butec to remain in this country. He has been cautious not to make his view publicly known. He has been most discreet. Still, word of his writings has somehow leaked to the government. Three days ago he was placed under unofficial house arrest. This afternoon he left his house by climbing down the drainpipe and running through backyards like a petty burglar. He must leave Yugoslavia at once.”

“Then let him leave by himself. Or let someone else take him.”

“It is impossible, Evan.”

“But-”

“Milan Butec has no experience in these matters. He could not go alone. Nor is there anyone whom we trust, anyone with the ability to escort Mr. Butec. But you, Evan, you slip in and out of countries with ease. Are you permitted in Yugoslavia? You are not. Yet how often have you come in and out of this country illegally?”

“But I travel light,” I protested. “I didn’t even bring a suitcase this time, just a flat portfolio that I can slip inside my jacket. I’d be hampered if I had to take the manuscript with me, let alone its author. And I’m not going west, Janos. I’m going north and east.”

“They will not expect that,” he said, undaunted.

“Of course they won’t. They’ll expect him to do the sensible thing and sneak out through Austria or Greece.”

“Exactly. And those are the frontiers they will guard, while you-”

“I can’t do it, Janos.”

“You must. Would you want this book suppressed? Would you want the author hanged?”

“Janos…”

We went around and around, Janos and I. I thought of countless alternatives and he explained at length why each one was unthinkable, why no one else could possibly take Butec to freedom, why Butec could not possibly go himself. We went around and around, and so did my head. The whole mission to rescue Sofija for Karlis had been impossible to begin with, but if I traveled light, I had the chance, say, of a snowball in hell. With Butec and his book in tow, even that much chance was denied me. He would be wanting to sleep all the time. He wouldn’t know the languages. He would get in the way, he would do something wrong.

Damn…

“You will come with me, Evan,” Janos said at last. “We will meet Mr. Butec.”

“Janos-”

“Come!”

Mr. Butec, Mr. Milan Butec, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs for the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, was a short and stout man with a neatly trimmed goatee, huge bushy eyebrows, and a hairless head. My heart sank when I saw him; he would be about as inconspicuous as a Negro in the D.A.R.

“This is Evan Michael Tanner,” Janos said. “This is the young man, Milan, who has agreed to lead you to freedom and to give the world the gift of your most precious book.”

This was a lie; I had agreed to nothing. But Butec – and what a fine book he had written, what a masterful book – scurried over to pump my hand. He tried to express his gratitude in English. His accent was thicker than Macedonian bean soup.

“It will be difficult,” I heard myself say.

“I am prepared for difficulty.”

“And dangerous.”

“I am prepared for dangerous.”

Prepared for dangerous? I swung us back to Serbo-Croat. “And you would have to disguise yourself, Mr. Butec.” I studied him, trying to think of a way to make him look a little less obviously himself. “A wig of some sort, I should think. And you would have to shave your beard. Perhaps the eyebrows as well, and then we would paint in less obtrusive eyebrows.”

“This shall be done as you say.”

He stroked his beard as he said this, and I knew he was vain about it. I only wished he was vain enough to offer an objection and leave me with a way out, but evidently his vanity placed second to his desire to see the last of Yugoslavia.

I said, with the heavy heart of one who goes on playing even after he knows he has lost, “It will be a hard trip, Mr. Butec. We will have to be on the move constantly. There won’t be much time for sleep and-”

Butec managed a smile. “Do not worry,” he said. And, drawing himself up to what there was of his full height: “Put your mind at ease in that department, Mr. Tanner. I can put up with such hardship. I have trained myself to make do with almost no sleep at all.”

Well, I thought, that was a help.

“There are times,” he added, “when I get by with as little as six hours sleep a night.”

“That’s marvelous,” I said.

When Milan Butec emerged from the lavatory, a straight razor clasped defensively in one hand and a valiant smile on his round white face, he had been all too literally shorn of the last vestiges of human dignity. The bald head gleamed as before, but now the beard was gone as well, revealing a weak chin. The missing eyebrows gave the whole head the uncanny appearance of a round ball of soft white cheese, indented here and there for eyes and a mouth, protruding a bit for a nose, but otherwise scarcely identifiable as a human head at all. The poor man evidently had a mad passion for escape; only that or abject masochism would permit a man to make such a profound mess of himself.

“I am not looking myself,” he said.

Janos maintained a tactful silence. His wife said something about coffee and retreated to the kitchen. Milan Butec and I regarded each other thoughtfully. With some sort of wig, I thought, and with rudimentary eyebrows drawn in to interrupt some of the awesome expanse of white skin, he would still look rather absurd. But he would look not at all like Milan Butec.

“We will need a wig,” I told Janos.

“This can be arranged. Black, do you think?”

“Perhaps a dark brown.”

“I shall see to it. What else?”

“An eyebrow pencil. If there’s nothing of the sort available, perhaps some charcoal or a burnt match-”

“Cosmetics are a petit bourgeois artifice not in keeping with the goals and ideals of a socialist nation,” Janos said solemnly. “My wife has several eyebrow pencils. You will want to take one with you, of course. It shall be provided.”

“And peasant clothing, something along the lines of what I am wearing. Milan Butec is an intellectual and a political leader. Dressed as a peasant, he will be less apt to be recognized.”

Janos assured me that appropriate garments of the correct size could be readily obtained. He could also furnish auto transportation to within a few miles of the frontier. From that point on, he said, we would be on our own.

We went to the kitchen and sat over cups of thick black coffee. Mme. Papilov excused herself once, returned with an eyebrow pencil, excused herself a second time and went away. Janos left us with the explanation that he would get hold of a wig and arrange for transportation immediately after breakfast the next morning. I poured fresh coffee for Butec and myself and fortified both cups with a tot of brandy.

“I know I am trouble for you,” he said. “I regret.”

“It is no trouble.”

“You are kind.” He stroked the air an inch from his chin, caressing where a beard had been for thirty years or so, then caught himself and stared at his hand. “Habits,” he said. “Men are so much the creatures of habit.”

“Yes.”

“I have spent over twenty years as a scholar, a bureaucrat, a political minister. But before this, you know, I was with the Partisans. I was a resistance leader in the war against fascism. I gave orders, and men followed my command.”